No, I don't think I'll stop writing code yet

Being a software engineer in 2026 is hard. Especially if you were to look at anything on X or LinkedIn. Everywhere you go, it's the same "I BUILT STUFF WITHOUT CODING. IT'S OVER!" posts bombarding you left right and center. It's slowly worming its way into threads too. On the 21st of January 2026 however, it's definitely been a little extra. And after some reflection, I want to write about why I reject this ideological push to devalue the act of writing code.

But first. How did we get here again?

The prediction, the nuance, and the vibe

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic has done it again. Another day. Another prediction. At least that's what the headlines and socials are shouting. Specifically they keep using this quote:

"Software Engineering will be automatable in 6-12 Months"

The full statement is far more nuanced than that so let me first get that clarification out of the way. You can watch it for yourself here (timestamped link). From Dario:

I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don't write any code anymore. I just I just let the model write the code. I edit it. I do the things around it. I think I don't know. We might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most maybe all of what SWES do end to end. ...

Right after that he also follows up with:

I think there's a lot of uncertainty. It's easy to see how this could take a few years. I don't... I... it's very hard for me to see how it could take longer than that. Um but if if I had to guess, I would guess that this goes faster than people imagine. And that that key element of code and increasingly research going faster than we imagine.. From Dario:

People might say I'm quibbling over semantics but I am also quite sick of us losing nuance.

That said. The overall point that folks are trying to make stays the same.

Elsewhere on the internet, Ryan Dahl, creator of Node JS says:

This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.

And then there was the famous quote from Dario again last year at the WEF of 2025:

"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.

Put this entire barrage of voices together and if you were to believe it without question, then there's only one inevitable future:

Prepare to never have to write code anymore. Writing code isn't it folks.

But is that true?

Expertise still needed

Let's accept some ground truths first. Even Dario doesn't say that the engineers don't touch code. They don't write it. But they edit it. They obviously review it. And we've already confirmed that if you let these things run wild ala gas town, you end up with a whole load of weirdness. Even in the underlying software around gas town. Really.

So you need to keep an eye on the code. Whether you like it or not, you need to know coding terminology. I've written about this topic on this Thread already. In that I've made the case for why you need expertise as well. Because whether you like it or not, these things are capable of driving themselves off a cliff. If they weren't they'd be training themselves by now. The fact that they aren't is proof enough. Sometimes I believe that the reason Claude and others subsidize users with plans that cost more to deliver than it earns is because the value they get in return is access to high quality RLHF (a formal term in the AI space, Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback).

But I digress. Even if these things didn't drive themselves off a cliff, we would still have a moral and ethical duty to understand what the machine does because when other people use it, the liability falls to us. The provider. And we aren't managing that liability that without expertise.

How we leverage that expertise may be changing but the fact will remain that expertise is non negotiable. Even Ryan Dahl acknowledges it lightly in the last line:

That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do

And so, if you accept that you need expertise to do this non syntax work, then the question that should follow is:

Great, how exactly does one gain this expertise?

The parallel to writing

Let's take an example that anyone can understand. Hopefully. You want to write a book. You hire some person to write it out for you. You provide the ideas. Maybe have a conversation. And then you say "now go along an incorporate all of that into a book". Maybe that example is closer to reality now because you could do that today with any of the major LLM providers. In fact there's so many people doing it that ebooks from the Kindle store are becoming impossible to browse as it fills up with authors who publish multiple books every month.

Regardless, would you look at yourself if you, or anyone else were doing that and say "I/this other person has expertise in writing?". No. You couldn't. So now you don't have expertise. You don't know how to judge the writing you got back. You don't know how to check it for errata. You don't know how to break down story and structure into something that subverts expectations better.

All you have is an idea and the ability to accept whatever you receive. You cannot contribute back. You cannot make it meaningfully better. So how on earth do you go about getting said expertise? There's only one way. And you cannot avoid it no matter what helper or AI anyone t at you.

You've got to do it yourself.

And that's the point.

Can't stop won't stop coding

As much as I've enjoyed the process of learning how to command an agent and offload work to a cloud buddy who does stuff while I enjoy a wedding, I know I can do that because I have expertise in programming. When something goes wrong I know where to look for it. I know when I can operate without a GEMINI.md file vs with one because I understand complexity. But if I tell myself I don't need to write code, eventually I will lose the ability to reason about it when I read it too. If I want to keep my ability of understanding what's happening in the code I can't let myself be flummoxed when an AI randomly wraps a call in an expensive or inscrutable .map() function. If a framework comes out with new features, I need to know how to utilize it. Not wait for an LLM to learn it for me.

Ultimately I'm responsible for what goes out there and if something is going to be used by other people, Claude isn't taking that responsibility for when things go wrong. I am. Anthropic isn't going to send down a team of crack engineers if I complain to them that CC accidentally ignored instructions on how to structure authorization properly in my app. No. That's 100% on me.

And if you think about it and imagine that the LLM is an engineer and you are a higher level manager, remind yourself what it feels like to have a leader who has technical mastery. We as an industry have spoken reverently of folks like Mitchell Hashimoto being such a technical CTO. Do you really think Mitchell needed to write code himself once Hashicorp became big enough? No. But he wrote it because he loved it and because he understood the value of remaining connected to technical work at a deep level.

He didn't spend hours only reading code either. Mitchell knew that if you want to truly gain expertise, the best way to do so is to actually do the thing^[1].

We don't read documentation and become experts do we?

So why are we so hell bent as an industry on trying to convince people to stop doing the thing that actually gives them expertise in the area they are watching over? Whatever the reason is, I implore you to ignore it. If you are thinking "some of the best minds in the world are telling me this", then don't forget that some of the best minds in the world could only talk about crypto a few years ago. When it comes to AI and never touching code, the noise they make will roar. But listen to it and let it pass. Focus on sharpening the saw.

Let me repeat myself here. As with writing or any other skill, you've got to do it to gain expertise in it. And like a muscle, even if you had expertise in it, if you don't use it you will lose it.

So when Darius or Sam or whoever says "the era of coding is over", and the noise of the internet tries to say "stop coding", I think there's only one real answer that should be given

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Posted on January 22 2026 by Adnan Issadeen